MATE University is targeted at all levels of developers (including beginners)
to learn how to develop new panel applets, Caja (file manager) extensions,
Pluma (text editor) and Eye of MATE (image viewer) plugins, etc. to expand
the already powerful MATE Desktop experience. There will be simple and well
commented code, makefiles and tips to use as springboard for new MATE applications.

The mate-notification-daemon has a new feature in MATE 1.6 that allows
users to select which monitor they want to display notifications on. The
current behavior only displays notifications on the monitor which is currently
active (where the pointer is). The behavior will default to as it has always
been, but the user can change the settings by modifying the “use-active-monitor”
and “monitor-number” keys in via dconf-editor or they can run
mate-notification-properties and edit their settings via a GUI.

Below is a screenshot of mate-notification-properties set for notifications
to be displayed on an active monitor. Note that “Use Active Monitor” is selected,
which disables the combobox for selecting a monitor.

Below is a screenshot of mate-notification-properties set for notifications
to be displayed on a specific monitor. Note that “Use Active Monitor” is not
selected, which enables the combobox for selecting the monitor to be enabled.
The monitor number is set to 2. This will display on my third monitor, since
counting starts at 0 instead of 1.

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE 1.2. This release is a
huge step forward since the 1.0 and 1.1 development releases. MATE is more
stable than ever and it includes support for many more applications, applets
and backends.

Here are the main changes and improvements in this release:

Numerous bug fixes

All conflicts with GNOME were fixed

All configuration files were moved to ~/.config/mate

An undo/redo feature was added in Caja

Libmate’s mate-open command is now faster to open applications

MATE settings daemon now supports the PulseAudio and GStreamer backends

We are currently in the process of switching to handling all our issues via
the mate-desktop project on GitHub instead
of Perberos’ page. The reason is simple: when Perberos is away none of the
other developers can close tickets. This creates a bit of a mess.

Now, when you go to report a bug you must chose the correct GitHub repository
to report the issue in. It’s pretty simple. If there’s a bug with mate-panel,
then submit the issue on the mate-panel issue tracker.

We’ll are no longer monitoring Perberos’ issue tracker, so we ask that you
refrain from opening new bugs there.

We’ve recently switched from a wiki at GitHub to a our own
available from wiki.mate-desktop.org. Please
reference this wiki from now on. Naturally, anyone is welcome to contribute.

For those of you who aren’t already aware, you can
report issues on github. At the moment, this
is all we have in terms of bug reporting, but we do have a bugtracker in the works.
We’ll announce it here when it’s ready.

We also have future plans for a Mate forum, but that is at a very early stage.

For those of you using Debian, Ubuntu,
and Linux Mint, you can access the 1.1.x development branch of
our packages using the tridex repository. Check out the download page
on the wiki for more info. Linux Mint also has our
1.0.x release packages in their repository. If anyone is still using Amanas’ PPA,
it is no longer supported. The rest of our 1.1.x releases will be hosted on the tridex
repositories. Future releases (eg. 1.2.0) will be hosted here.

We are proud to announce that packing for openSUSE has begun.
Once we have more information we will add it to our wiki and make an announcement.

Lastly, we have had several individuals join our IRC channel
and ask about Gentoo ebuilds for MATE. With that being said,
we are looking for people who are willing to set these up.

Gnome 2 was the most popular Linux desktop but it’s no longer available… MATE
is here to provide that same desktop to you :)

Perberos initially forked Gnome 2 and called the project MATE. Users and
developers have successfully run MATE on Arch Linux
and due to popular demand Perberos made it easier for MATE to compile under
Debian.

Our top priority is to improve MATE and for it to be on par, in terms of features
and stability, with Gnome 2.32. We’ll port themes, applets, and applications which
were developed for Gnome 2, and help developers port their applications to this
new desktop.